The unchosen people

Did the Palestinians go or were they pushed? The debate among historians racks Israel

IT IS not always easy for a man to speak truthfully about his early childhood. For a nation it can be harder still. Next year Israel turns 50, an age that finds some men complacent but others still at war with their inner demons. Israel in middle age shows both tendencies. Many Israelis have come to sense that their state's survival is at last assured, a feeling that has brought ease to some but caused others to examine what might be called Israel's original sin.

This analysis hurts. Through all its adversities, Israel has generally enjoyed the singular luxury of believing in its own cause. This was a conviction nourished not only by the immoderate aims of its enemies (Israel delenda est), but also by the epic circumstances of its own birth (the calamity of the Holocaust, redemption in the promised land). Few Israelis have been disposed to question the story that Israel came into being in response to an overwhelming need, against terrible odds, and in the face of unremitting Arab hostility.

So, at least, the story used to go until a group of Israeli historians started shining a cold white light on the true circumstances of Israel's beginnings. They tell a less flattering story that questions some cherished assumptions: that the Jewish victory in 1948 was a victory of the few against the many, that the Palestinian refugees fled voluntarily, and that the Arab states closed their minds firmly from the beginning to the very possibility of peace with the new state.

The core text in the new history appeared a decade ago in Benny Morris's “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Taking advantage of declassified state documents in America, Britain and Israel, he took a new look at what caused 600,000-800,000 of the Arabs of Palestine to flee during the war of 1947-49. For obvious reasons, the matter had remained largely unexamined in Israeli society if not in Israeli historiography. Just as the early Zionists had optimistically (and inaccurately) described Palestine as a land without a people for a people without a land, so many Israelis had been content to believe that the Palestinians fled of their own accord, in panic or at the behest of the Arab states.

Mr Morris painted a darker and more complex picture, detailing the many instances during that war when the Palestinian inhabitants of towns and villages were deliberately put to flight. There was, he concluded, no overall Zionist plan to evict all the Arabs of Palestine: many of the expulsions took place in the heat of battle and the fog of war. But he also argued that the idea of a population transfer—by agreement with the Arab states if possible, but by force if necessary—had been carefully considered by David Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders, and hovered in the background of their actions and deliberations.

Soon afterwards another “new” historian, Avi Shlaim, went further in “Collusion across Jordan” (Oxford University Press, 1988). He claimed that Golda Meir, who subsequently became prime minister of Israel, and Transjordan's King Abdullah agreed secretly, with British acquiescence, to carve up Palestine between them, depriving the Palestinian Arabs of the portion that was to be theirs under the partition plan of the United Nations. Whether or not there was a secret agreement, this is what actually happened.

These two histories are only the most prominent in what is now a popular genre. To cite a few examples: in his subsequent writings Mr Morris has criticised the policy of retaliation raids adopted by Israel in the 1950s (“Israel's Border Wars”; Clarendon Press, 1993), Ilan Pappé of Haifa University has added further curlicues to the collusion thesis (“The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict; Tauris, 1992), and Mr Shlaim has accused Israel of missing opportunities to make peace soon after the 1948 war.

Others have strayed beyond relations with the Arabs to ask even harsher questions about Israel's birth. In “The Seventh Million” (Hill and Wang, 1993), Tom Segev of Haaretz, Israel's top quality daily, examined the ambivalence with which members of the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—greeted the fate of their European brethren during the second world war, and the new state's later exploitation of the Holocaust as an instrument of nation-building and self-justification.

What to make of this spate of reinterpretation? Some Israeli intellectuals seem to take solace in the thought that, unsettling though the revelations of the new historians may be, they demonstrate a national coming of age. In “Rubber Bullets” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), for instance, Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist, makes a gallant attempt to weave Israel's new readiness to face up to its past with its crisis of conscience during the Palestinian intifada. He sees in his own relations with his father and his son a “battle of the stories”, as a new generation of Israelis tries to emancipate itself from the “internalised national epic”.

This is all very well. But for all the psychological plausibility of the new historians, are they writing decent history? In “Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians” (Cass, 1997), Ephraim Karsh, an “old” historian but a youngish and evidently angry man, accuses the new historians of getting their facts wrong, and— worse—of doing so out of the very motives they ascribe to the old historians: namely to make an ideological point. “More than anything else,” he writes, “the new historiography is a state of mind, or rather, of fashion. What unites its practitioners, by and large, is subscription to the all-too-common perception of Zionism as an offshoot of European imperialism, or at the very least as an aggressive and expansionist movement.”

Mr Karsh charges the new historians, not least, with exaggerating their own novelty: Israel's “old” historians, he says, never subscribed to the simplistic one-dimensional view of the Arab-Israeli conflict that the new historians target and parody. He also challenges the new historians on matters of substance. There was, he asserts, no collusion of the kind Mr Shlaim describes between Israel and Transjordan. The fact that Abdullah and Meir met is not in doubt, but Mr Karsh produces a report overlooked by Mr Shlaim, in which Meir tells her colleagues how she explained to the king that the Jewish side could not support a violation of the UN partition plan.

It is, however, against Mr Morris that Mr Karsh deploys his heaviest guns. One of Mr Morris's contentions, remember, is that the Zionist leadership all along foresaw the need to expel the Arabs of Palestine from the areas allotted to the Jewish state under the UN's partition plan. Mr Morris based this claim on Ben-Gurion's own speeches and writings. But in a forensic examination of precisely the same writings, Mr Karsh reaches the opposite conclusion. He accuses Mr Morris of wilfully distorting the record by selective quotation.

Space permits just one example of this creative editing. Mr Morris concedes that Ben-Gurion did not publicly advocate the collective transfer of the Arabs, but he claims to find a hint of this idea in a speech by the great man summarised thus:

Ben-Gurion starkly outlined the emergent Jewish state's main problem—its prospective population of 520,000 Jews and 350,000 Arabs. Including Jerusalem, the state would have a population of about 1m, 40% of which would be non-Jews. ‘This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and sharpness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be complete certainty that the government will be held by a Jewish majority There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%.' The Yishuv's situation and fate, he went on, compelled the adoption of ‘a new approach [new] habits of mind' to ‘suit our new future. We must think like a state'.

As Mr Karsh complains, this passage leaves the impression that Ben-Gurion advocated population transfer to solve the new state's demographic problems. What Mr Morris does not report is that Ben-Gurion added:

From here stems the first and principal conclusion. In order to ensure not only the establishment of the Jewish state but its existence and destiny as well, we must bring 1 1/2m Jews to the country and root them here. It is only when there will be at least 2m Jews in the country that the state will be truly established.

In other words, Jewish immigration, not the expulsion of the Arabs, was Ben-Gurion's solution. As for the Arabs in the Jewish state, he went on to say in the self-same speech:

We must think in terms of a state, in terms of independence, in terms of full responsibility for ourselves—and for others. In our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception . . . The attitude of the Jewish state to its Arab citizens will be an important factor in building good neighbourly relations with the Arab states. If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, and if his status will not be in the least different from that of the Jew then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance will be built.

Mr Karsh's will assuredly not be the last word. In an exchange last year in Mid dle East Quarterly, Mr Shlaim mounted a spirited (and, given the asperity of Mr Karsh's attack, good-natured) defence of his collusion thesis. More recently, in Haaretz, Mr Morris complained with some justice that Mr Karsh had sought to rubbish the exhaustive arguments of a long book by singling out only a couple of pages.

It is true that some infelicitous pieces of selective quotation do not confute a whole thesis. Nor could a dispassionate reader of Mr Morris's measured book agree with Mr Karsh that its author was determined to portray the Zionist movement as colonial and aggressive. Mr Morris concluded, after all, that no overall order or master plan existed to evict the Arabs. Indeed, Palestinian writers say Mr Morris is too ready to justify those expulsions that did occur as ad hoc military responses to the vicissitudes of war. Mr Karsh also ought to heed the advice of an old historian, Itamar Rabinovich, in his “The Road Not Taken” (Oxford University Press, 1991): you do not have to accept the whole of the “new” history in order to recognise the need to correct and refine the orthodox version.

Nonetheless, Mr Karsh seems to have scored a palpable hit on the contentious issue of the strategic thinking of Ben-Gurion. And on this issue there is, after all, something large at stake: did the Zionist movement genuinely proffer a hand of friendship or did it see all along the need for ethnic cleansing?

The war of Israel's historians is fated to continue. That is probably, on balance, a good thing. Nobody can deny that, whatever the original intentions of Zionism's leaders, their project turned out to have calamitous consequences for the Arabs of Palestine. It may be that by accepting their portion of the blame Israelis will find it easier to reach a reconciliation with the Palestinians. But not, it is to be hoped, by rewriting their country's history.